David Cameron disdains you

Two little snippets from Tuesday.

When asked on LBC why the generals are so concerned about defence spending, the first words out of Cameron’s mouth were these (link):

Obviously, they have their own book to talk — sometimes quite literally a book to talk — and sometimes they just want to make their views known.

This is clearly a response to Sir Peter Wall, whose critical article appeared in The Daily Telegraph that morning (link). It’s worth remembering that when Cameron was a PR flack at a defunct TV station, Sir Peter was serving his country by commanding soldiers in Yugoslavia.

The same day, the FT reported that Cameron has asked his ministers to find ways to pad out defence spending without actually spending more money (link):

Oliver Letwin, head of policy at Number 10, has been asked to consider what kinds of spending can be categorised by Nato as “defence” expenditure in order to keep the UK close to the 2 per cent target, one government figure said.

The FT noted that Cameron is already cooking the books to hit 2%:

Ministry of Defence officials have already managed to boost the amount included in Nato calculations significantly this year. The ministry is to add war pensions, worth slightly more than £800m annually, to its Nato submission for 2015–16. This means UK spending will just meet the 2 per cent commitment this year.

So even now Cameron is being borderline dishonest when he says that “[w]e’ve met the 2% during this Parliament and we’re due to meet it in the coming years”. Perhaps this should not be a surprise: Luke Coffey, former adviser to Liam Fox, today accuses Cameron of going back on a personal pledge to increase defence spending (link), arguing that this pledge was the only thing that prevented defence chiefs from resigning in protest.

What should we conclude from this?

Simply, if you are concerned about defence spending, then Cameron thinks one of three things about you:

• You’re stupid, and can’t see through his accounting tricks
• You’re self-serving, and only care about defence spending to the extent it personally enriches you
• You’re not important, and don’t warrant having your concerns taken seriously